Published
By Myrna M. Velasco
As Luzon grid waded
through brownout-stricken summer months this year, the Energy Regulatory
Commission (ERC) is enforcing limits on the “unplanned” or forced outages as
well as the duration of scheduled maintenance downtimes that power plants must
have to contend with in their operations.
In one-year span, it
was prescribed that pulverized coal and circulating fluidized bed (CFB) coal
plant technologies must only log “unplanned outages” equivalent to 29.8 days.
Meanwhile, for combined
cycle gas plants, unplanned outages must be limited to 14.9 days in a year; gas
turbines are allowed 22.4 equivalent of forced outage days; diesel plants for
12.3 days; hydroelectric plants for 28.4 days; and oil-fired thermal plants’
forced outages must only be for a maximum of 27.6 days.
For planned outages or those that are scheduled shutdowns, coal plants are
allowed up to 28.4 days; combined cycle gas plants can have up to 29.3 days;
gas turbines are capped at 14.7 days; diesel for 7.5 days; hydroelectric
facilities will have the highest duration of 41.1 days; and oil-fired thermal
plants for 31.2 days.
Based on the rules
being advanced by the ERC, the technologies prescribed with most days of
planned and unplanned outages would be the hydro plants for a total of 69.5
days; followed by oil-fired thermal plants with 58.8 days; then coal plants
with 58.2 days.
Diesel plants will have
the lowest number of “unavailable days” in the system for a total of 19.8 days
for both planned and unplanned outages; then gas turbines with 37.1 days of
outages allowance; then combined cycle gas facilities with 44.2 days on the
aggregate.
“The Commission intends that the outage allowance in days per year, as
determined, will serve as the maximum or cap per technology for all power
plants,” the ERC stressed.
The regulatory agency
further specified that “for power supply agreement (PSA) applications, if the
proposed outage allowance in days per year (or the total of the planned and
unplanned outages in the PSA) is different from what is determined under these
rules, the Commission will use in its evaluation of said PSA the outage
allowance as proposed or the determined outage allowance (for the specific
technologies), whichever is lower.”
With the incursion of
messy rotating brownouts in some days in April, May and June, the ERC had been
prodded to craft rules on the allowable shutdowns of power plants – especially
the forced outages because they could compromise supply availability or strain
reserves in the country’s power grids.
And from the prescribed outage limits, the regulator must also enforce penalty
scheme against the power plants or the generation companies (GenCos) that will
be breaching the shutdown caps on specified generating assets.
Taking off from that,
the industry regulator has issued the template of the proposed rules and the
prescribed outages allowances per power plant technology – and it has been
soliciting preliminary inputs and comments from stakeholders until July 26
(Friday) this year; and the final comments shall be submitted by August 4 this
year.
In a notice sent out by
ERC Commissioner Josefina Patricia M. Asirit, it has been stipulated that “all
comments received by the Commission shall be made part of the record of the
rule-making proceeding and shall be considered in the finalization of the
proposed rules.”
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